By Fleur Adcock
Sealed in their heavy luggage in the hold
they’d brought the encapsulated highlights
of their shed lives: Eva’s sewing machine
and her Watteau Doulton dinner service;
Sam’s tools, of course; the tea urn his father
had made using his skills as a tinsmith,
learnt in the packing-case trade, some books; the
postcard album bulging with eight or nine
years of miniature correspondence;
and the oval portrait, painted in her
sixties, of Sam’s apple-cheeked grandmother
Mary Adcock, née Pell (or perhaps Peel),
in her plaid shawl, who came out of nowhere.
As for the books, the ranged in weight down from
the Bible through Sam’s other sacred text,
The Amateur Carpenter and Builder,
to a pocket-sized sliver: Hoyle’s Games.
Packed side by side with Sunday school prizes
(John Cotton ... A New Temperance Tale of
Lancashire Life) was something different:
The Awful Disclosures of Maria
Monk (convent, nuns, dead babies): a dollop
of bigotry for the new country – which
had its own – and an unexpected read
for a bemused future grandchild to pluck
from the glass-fronted bookcase Sam would build.
